Special session on Socio-Behavioural Research and Human-Centred Design (SOCBER)

Scope

Socio-Behavioural Research and Human-Centred Design (SOCBER) is a new special session  institutionalised under the International Conference on Decision Economics (DECON) 2025. SOCBER focuses on the socio-behavioural issues involved with human motivations, activities, and cognitive processes, including psychological interactions in small groups, families, communities, social structures, and whole societies. Socio-behavioural research applies the behavioural and social sciences to studying humans and human-centred design as a problem-solving approach that puts the people and societies we are analysing and designing for at the heart of decision-making. This research is now commonly conducted within and across the following academic areas and a uniquely broad range of fields: Education, sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, computer science, political science, history, public health and biomedical studies, and emerging fields such as data science and artificial intelligence. Thus, the session is interdisciplinary in nature, both in its content and outcomes, and crosses methods and constructs.

Specifically, SOCBER aims to explore the most effective and proficient methodologies, techniques, and tools for representing, modelling, analysing, understanding, and managing human behaviour, socio-economic phenomena, and social and cultural characteristics in the interconnected world. Accordingly, the session is intended to be useful for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers who are particularly interested in the theory of change along the social value chain. Indeed, it provides a comprehensive view of new theoretical and epistemological perspectives, advocating a paradigm shift in explaining the social world and therefore cross-fertilising knowledge. Sociological theory has recently moved away from quantitative variable-based explanations, which need to be revised for understanding macro-level social facts and large-scale social processes. Instead, the session proposes a new strategy that delves deeper into the key factors contributing to social phenomena, using multiple models, methods, and analyses. SOCBER, indeed, can provide proper scientific explanations for complex social issues by identifying these factors, promoting scientific knowledge that is more receptive to social problems related to human behaviour and decision-making (among others, see Hedström & Swedberg, 1998; and Hedström, 2005).  
In this regard, the socio-behavioural research approach is proving effective in achieving the above and has stood out. By analysing human attitudes and behaviours, this approach generates models and theories that can be used to design or intervene in various socio-economic dynamics and situations, especially when the design is not straight-jacketed into a linear process. Socio-behavioural research follows, therefore, a comprehensive systems approach and enforces rigorous analytical frameworks and strict, replicable research protocols involving concepts and methods, as well as data collection, analysis, and interpretation. This helps the research approach maintain scientific rigour, build an evidence base, and foster fruitful, interdisciplinary dialogue, keeping with the central theme of DECON 2025.

Socio-behavioural research reveals critical insights and contextual understanding pertinent to social implementation science. People-centred design, or anthropocentric design, has become necessary by involving end users in the overall design process. This is an essential requirement for successfully implementing any behavioural or structural interventions promoting social-related outcomes. Nevertheless, the field has yet to harness the full potential of behavioural and social sciences research. Interestingly, experimental and computational social science approaches offer a way to define and quantify the socio-behavioural dimensions of humanities, monitoring both the cultural and the cognitive domains. With this in mind, it can be argued that social behavioural work is engaged in several key research projects and ongoing studies, primarily related to human-centred design.

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Topics

• Socio-behavioural research and community based research: Understanding the complex drivers of human behaviour in the explanation of the social world.
• What are the reasons for social programmes to use behavioural science and human-centred design?
• Integrating systems thinking, social and behaviour change frameworks: Measurement in the social design process.
• Involving behavioural and social processes complementing various domains, from biomedicine to epidemiology and social sciences.
• Behavioural, economic, and socio-cultural computing: Methods for analysing human behaviours and social characteristics in the connected world.
• Stakeholder consultations and opportunities for integrating socio-behavioural factors into the risk analysis process.
• The methods and mindsets of human-centred design: Convergence and divergence as mental strategies and the perpetual trap of financial literacy.
• Human-centric intelligent systems: Agent-based modelling advocated for mechanism-based sociology.
• Applying design thinking to smart societies, international research, and development studies: The sociological turn and its challenges.
• Critically discuss the role of decision-making in responding to historical and current perspectives on socio-behavioural research.
• Theoretical issues related to sociology and social work within different aspects of human sciences and natural systems.
• New research opportunities for the social sciences: The challenge of digital behavioural data, digital observations of humans, and algorithmic behaviour.
• Aiming to remain objective through quasi-controlled research settings and strict control for researcher bias.
• Exploring how individual behaviour might affect specific user needs, expectations, and requirements while aiding decision-making.
• Critically interpreting quantitative and qualitative research and propose evidence-based approaches to improving social and human sciences.
• Promoting high-quality, ethical research for social, cultural, and economic well-being: Analytical and design approaches.
• Emerging common misconceptions about design research: Abductive logic in design research, this one unknown.
• Human-centred design, service design, design thinking, and systems design: Understanding the citizen perspective.
• Socio-behavioural research and operations research on cost-effective integration and delivery of public policies.
• Building multi-disciplinary combination approaches for real-world implementation in understanding priority populations and risk settings.
• Contributing to the effective implementation of combined and multi-level strategies: Recent experiences in longitudinal, multisource studies of the impact of pandemics.
• Understanding basic behavioural and social factors: Digital interventions designed with behaviour change theory.
• Applying the behavioural and social sciences research functional framework to human-centred design.
• Advancing behavioural and social interventions: Quality of life and sustainable development.
• The intersection of public policy research with behavioural and social sciences research: An interdisciplinary approach.
• Raising awareness and assessing the plausibility of the behavioural and social sciences for public health and social measures in the workplace.
• Population response to the risk of vector-borne diseases: Lessons learned from socio-behavioural research during large-scale outbreaks.
• Factors holding people and communities back from achieving their life goals and realising their aspirations.
• Structured behavioural approach: A novel game-changer in economic analysis and policy formulation or simply a bicycle repair shop?
• Public servants designing, procuring, or managing human-centred design projects: Gearing toward improved social outcomes.
• Understanding the evolving social dynamics of emerging infectious diseases to help anticipate and (hopefully) ease current and future risks.
• Using theories of change for human development and evaluation: Studying the links between actions, outcomes, and contexts as causal mechanisms of social initiatives.
• Whatever happened to human-centred designing? Anything but the nudge in the controversial green passport to work issued in Italy from August 2021 to April 2022.
• Heuristic evaluation: How to assess the effectiveness of community-led safety campaigns?

SOCBER 2025 welcomes empirical, experimental, theoretical, epistemological and methodological papers, among other insightful engagements, addressing the above or related questions from various fields and standpoints. Specifically, we invite researchers and scholars to submit papers that contribute to the development of research methods and theoretical frameworks in socio-economic and behavioural factors influencing choice, as well as design and people research. Applied papers should discuss new policy initiatives, best practices, and lessons learned in the broader social science area so that practitioners, academicians, and policy decision-makers can benefit from the emerging knowledge gained. Strictly empirical, computational, and lab or field experimental studies are also welcome. Finally, we encourage papers on quantitative and qualitative methods addressing interdisciplinary research approaches. Methodology articles should be based on empirical evidence and provide clear guidance for researchers who wish to use a particular research method. Theoretical papers should concretely develop or refine theoretical frameworks in the field of inquiry. SOCBER welcomes papers that propose new theoretical models, designs, or algorithms, as well as papers that critically assess, revise, and upgrade existing ones. Theoretical papers should be based on a sound theoretical foundation, construct hypothetical scenarios, develop models, or engage in thought experiments while offering instructions to researchers on how to replicate them. Papers will be judged on novelty, relevance, significance, correctness, soundness, and clarity.